Skinny-dipping Read Free Page B

showed either confidence or stupidity, and where personal injury litigation lottery stakes are at play, the former is often a reflection of the latter. Me, I’m a “bird in the hand beats two in the bush” sort of girl. I would have taken the offer. Never let a jury of strangers decide your fate if you can help it, that would be my advice.
    But, of course, the good-parents had not asked me. And now Jackson wanted to hand this mess off to me.
    â€œSure,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had a choice, since I was barely even a partner and crap runs downhill, so I might as well pretend to take it with good graces. “Got a trial date yet?”
    â€œEnd of the month. But I filed a motion for continuance. It’s before Judge Goddard. You argue the motion.”
    â€œWhat’re the grounds?” I asked, thinking, Other than the usual justice-delayed maxim and the natural human tendency to put off as long as possible anything that was difficult to do.
    â€œThe parents’ attorney hired off our leading expert witness, and we need to find another one. You’d better hit MEDLINE this afternoon and read up on the literature, find the leading CMV experts. Look for somebody we don’t have to fly in from California, all right?”
    â€œYou mean our doctor who was so emphatic that this sort of brain damage could only develop in the womb? He bailed on us?” My heart made the kind of conspicuous thump-thump that happens after a loud noise late at night.
    â€œYeah. For twice our hourly rate. After he changed his mind, I set him up for another deposition. Under oath, son of a bitch says the money Stephen LaBlanc offered him didn’t have a thing to do with it. Our doctor’s damn insurance company’s so cheap we can’t even keep a decent expert. Then this overpaid expert says he erred in his initial opinion because we distorted the facts about the microcephaly.”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œMicrocephaly. You know, kid was born with a small head. You don’t remember that?”
    Yeah, I remembered the small-head thing, only I called it a small-head thing, not microcephaly.
    So we were screwed with that physician whore. Nice trick on Stephen’s part, I thought.
    â€œBetter get busy.” Jackson put down his coffee cup, keeping his eyes even with mine, probably checking for panic. I hoped he couldn’t hear the thump-thump-thump of my heart, my now fully activated fight-or-flight response in place. Even my mouth had dried up. I smiled, reassuringly I hoped, to the man who had just ruined my life.
    Oh, just frigging great, I thought, as I watched him leave. If I didn’t get that continuance, I had less than three weeks to find an expert, hire him, coach him, amend the witness list to include the new expert, set up his deposition so Stephen LeBlanc couldn’t bitch “unfair surprise” and keep my expert off the stand, get ready for the trial, and maintain my regular caseload.
    My left eye pounded and my shoulders twitched in spasms.
    Two minutes after Jackson left my office, I poured another cup of coffee and heaped it with turbinado sugar, the soul food of any personal crisis. I turned on my computer and went online, accepting my karma that I was soon going to know more than anyone could possibly want to about cytomegalovirus, wisely called CMV, and I had better find a good medical expert, quick.
    Just what I wanted to be, the law firm’s leading expert on an unpronounceable virus. Already my “anything wrong with your mouth” fifteen minutes of pop-star status at my law firm had faded. My law firm, where if you rested on your laurels, somebody would steal your billings and your leather desk chair.

Chapter 4
    My full name is Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary, named after both grandmothers and a maiden aunt, and I haven’t answered to Lilly Belle Rose since I was six and got expelled for hitting a boy who kept calling me that. In even